


The second body, equal and opposite

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-27 00:51:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2672750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The law that the Mistress lives by is a solipsism of two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The second body, equal and opposite

_If we, dear, know we know no more_  
 _Than they about the Law,_  
 _If I no more than you_  
 _Know what we should and should not do..._

_~_

It’s a simple equation, the simplest she ever sets.

The Doctor hurts her. She hurts him back.

Missy’s universe, her heart, is really not that complicated. She didn’t know this before, or couldn’t admit it. But she’s had some time to think (and actually used it well; after all, she’s had time to think in the past), and self-reflection has done her good. She’s much smarter as a Time Lady: she’d have made the change sooner, if she’d realised.

And now the Doctor has done something terribly, deliberately hurtful, right there in plain sight for her to see. She’s literally a captive audience, can’t even turn away or shut her ears, or pretend it never happened and let it slide, just this once, no.

It’s cruel.

It’s thoughtless.

It’s practically a thrown gage.

It’s also like taunting a sick animal in its den, and in this case the animal is her hearts, which struggle and thrash in her chest and want to claw their way out and savage the hand that holds the stick and the torch with the fire and the power to hurt her like this.

She used to think the Doctor must _want_ her to hurt him back, like she was the punishment he’d set for himself. Now, she thinks it’s simpler than that for him. Now, she thinks he just wants to cause her pain.

Well, that’s fine, that’s absolutely _fine_ ; Missy is no one’s hair shirt. She won’t be used like that. Bad enough it’s so easy for him to make her lose control. Bad enough it even matters to her so very much every stupid thing he does.

He makes her watch him offer the one thing she could never have to a primitive, insecure little human (a human who, like all of them, dares think that she’s good enough for the honour, that despite her failings she’s _better_ for him). Oh, sure, he’s made pretty speeches. Sure, he’s suggested things, enticing things. But only under duress, only as desperate, sneaky ploys to stop her carrying out the plans he didn’t want her making, and therefore empty promises. He would never have followed through.

And the one time, perhaps, he might have meant it, the Master had been too stubborn, too put out at having _lost_ after such a long time waiting, too compelled to rub it in that smug, self-congratulatory face. He’d made a fatal error, out of pride and the desire to hurt the Doctor back in payment for the whole taunting, infuriating year (there it was again, the simple reaction, one driving the other out of equilibrium).

Besides, he couldn’t have accepted, couldn’t have gone with it, not on those terms.

It would have been a different kind of pain entirely, the cage and the collar.

And then, eventually, they would have killed or destroyed each other anyway.

The Master couldn’t be _kept_ , least of all by his best enemy. The Mistress, however...she’s much smarter as a Time Lady, and she’s had time to think.

It’s not letting the Doctor have his way if she handpicks his companions. It’s not surrender if _she_ writes the terms. And her first term is this: Not _that_ one, thinks she’s so smart, unfortunate fashion choices, showing off to teacher like she has the right to even a moment of his attention. He’s petting the dog and promising it a treat and it smiles a sickening excited smile all to itself like it has been entrusted with the best present in the universe--and Missy didn’t use to be someone who kicked an animal because his friend was kind to it, but that was a long time ago.

People change.

Because Missy also didn’t use to have to look on while that friend turned away and shared his intimacies with somebody else. Because there was a time they were first and foremost to each other, that companion you can never wait to see because his soul reverberates with yours and sets it singing. Because now when he looks at her it’s to see through her; now when he sees her he sees something he really only wants to resent.

The human girl, all the human girls, represent the life whose loss the Master has never understood; their existence salts endlessly the wound of repudiation.

The Doctor looks at this one with sudden appreciation like she’s been clever, and his head bowed in familiar conference over a workbench makes Missy want to scream.

Before, the rising drums would have mediated the pressure in her blood, but that’s mercury that’s been drained away, and now there’s only hot certainty and cold heartache. She listens to the directives her anger gift her. There’s relief in acknowledging the reasons she does the things she does.

The act of killing the girl (she did too smell--like sweaty toiletty human musk), of making her properly scared before popping the balloon, she supposes, is fun. By the time the Doctor returns Missy has basically forgotten what it felt like, save for the sensation of plastic grinding into grit under her shoe and the brief satisfaction of breaking one of the Doctor’s toys.

The violence on the Doctor’s face, though, looking up at her with the crushed glasses in his hand, in the moment he shifts from realisation to wrath, _that_ Missy feels ineradicably. If outrage is the only emotion she can claim from him, at least it’s hers. Proof she can still rouse some passion.

She thinks, with a thrill, that he’s going to hit her.

He has it in him, this regeneration. He keeps it tightly checked, which is new, but that’s what you do when you’re afraid of your own darkness, you draw the curtains against it and pretend it isn’t waiting outside the circle of the fire’s glow. You gather your dignity like a cloak and hope that it’ll save you from yourself, because no one else is willing. And when it doesn’t, even you don’t recognise the thing that rips its way into being.

His fury is breathtaking, simultaneously righteous and naïve. His lip curls and his teeth show and his eyes are hooded and accusatory and alight with savagery. “Why are you doing this?” is an artless question but forgiveable considering all the years the Master himself didn’t really know.

What else could she do? Her life is a medium shot through so many times with the sharp filaments of him that pull them out (and he has, oh he has done, one cruel thread at a time or sometimes fistfuls all at once) and she’s more space than matter, a warren of threaded wounds. The Mistress is aware she’s hollow (directionless, unstable) without the Doctor. He is the pivot around which she revolves and the frame of reference against which she holds herself erect.

For a long time, she tried to defy this hateful law. Maybe it was possible, once. She can’t remember.

Once, she, too, felt things besides rage, besides pain (hers, his, even other people’s).

Later, she watches him tell his new friends that she can’t feel pain, and the choked disbelieving hiccough of a laugh catches in her throat, because she has felt so much pain she is numb to anything kinder.

She would have liked him to have hit her.

She would have liked to feel the sting. She would have liked the physical proof he really does _want_ to hurt her, and that she can be hurt, a red mark across her cheek, a bruise under her eye, look at me, _see me_.

See your imprint on me. The impression of your hand on my skin. That of your soul on my psyche.

If the Doctor is lonely wandering the stars, the Mistress is alone in an interior space empty of light. Somewhere, between the spectres of his faces, there is the echo of an autonomy she’s never been able to reclaim.

It’s law now, not the human law of right and shouldn’t, not even Time Lord law of might and mustn’t, but a law of physical bodies, a law of mathematical symmetries, an _a priori_ law like love.

 _Whatever_ the Doctor does, the Mistress will do in return. Hurt her then, reject her, cage her. Be cruel, she knows how to do that. Be an enemy, she is the best. She can fight and plot and rage; she’s had a long time to hone those arts.

Love her, see what happens.

An antagonist is just a mirror, and a reflection is a faithful likeness. Invisible strings like wire slave her to every twitch of his fingers. She may be giving him the world by threatening to end the world, and of course it’s fun to see him writhe, but the power she’s really ceding is sincere.

_I need you to know we’re not so different._

_You know what I’ve worked out? What you really need? To know that you’re just like me._

_From now on, you decide the outcome._

It’s not a surrender, it’s only an admission. And a hope--maybe, if he is just like her, then she, in turn, might not be so different from him. He’s had his redemption, and been freed to find his way, stumble as he will running across it (as he does, as he always has). She’s bananas, rotten fruit with flies twisting inside. But he murdered his own species, knowingly erased it in its entirety from time and space. What is what she has done, in comparison to that?

She would be the mirror without silvering, the reaction equal but not opposite, a similarity not at all timid. A balanced equation. An equivalence relation.

She takes his hands, she grasps at straws, skin to skin and rage to rage, other to other adrift in a moral system that’s simple, that’s his. She’s his. He backs away and she follows, clasped to him and she can’t let go or the universe will drag and rend on identity and she’ll fall into the hollow heart for good.

 _Help me, help me; save me; redeem me._ Or not. The choice, to act, that’s what she’s given him: _It’s yours, it’s yours._

~

_...We shall boast anyway:_  
 _Like love I say._

_Like love we don't know where or why,_  
 _Like love we can't compel or fly,_  
 _Like love we often weep,_  
 _Like love we seldom keep._

\--W.H. Auden, “Law, Like Love”


End file.
